


Written in the Stars

by humanalias



Category: The Phantom Ship - Frederick Marryat
Genre: Gen, Misses Clause Challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 20:02:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/601545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/humanalias/pseuds/humanalias
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>My dear Yuletide recipient: After I finished reading <i> The Phantom Ship</i> I found myself wishing there had been a whole book about Amine. I was fascinated by the relationship she has with her mother, even though we don't see hardly any of it "on screen." I hope you enjoy my story and have a happy Yuletide.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Written in the Stars

**Author's Note:**

  * For [zopyrus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/zopyrus/gifts).



> My dear Yuletide recipient: After I finished reading _The Phantom Ship_ I found myself wishing there had been a whole book about Amine. I was fascinated by the relationship she has with her mother, even though we don't see hardly any of it "on screen." I hope you enjoy my story and have a happy Yuletide.

When she is younger, there is never much further to explore past the walls of the garden.

She would climb up the wall circling their home, bracing her feet against the corners and wedging her toes in the cracks between the mortar. The wall is more ornamental than defensive, and it doesn't take more than a few minutes of heavy breathing to pull herself up to the top. Amine sat and swung her feet, happy enough to examine men and women hurrying on to their houses or glimpse the ships pulling into the harbor. Other times, when the streets were empty, she threw her shoes down into the garden and walked along the ledge, feeling to stone and grit underneath her soles.

Ravens stalked the walls, unafraid of humans, perhaps unafraid of anything. Every time, she would try to sneak close enough to see the sheen of feathers under a hot sun, the blackness of a raven's eye. She wondered what those eyes saw, what was hidden to them high above the earth. A bird could not see inside a home, a mosque, or a palace. It could not understand the words of her or any human. But it could rise above the rivers and plains, the hills and mountains. Amine wondered what it would be to feel a different ground under her feet or to smell the tang of the sea.

If Amine had ever smelled the sea, she could not remember. Her mother had seen the ocean and even more than that. Her mother can conjure spirits, compel true dreams, and divine the future. The servants whispered that she spoke to djinni, could curse or cure as a whim took her. They imagined her ring was one of Solomon's own, that the gaze under her furrowed brow could bring on the evil eye.

Sometimes Amine helped her mother - throwing sweet smelling herbs in the brazier, fetching her books and celestial charts, and all the while wondering when it might be her chance to learn. Whenever Amine asked for more, her mother smiled and said, "Soon."

Bent over her charts, compass, abacus, scrolls, she kissed Amine and said, "These spirits of the earth, ocean, and heavens, might be conjured by thee, but you must wait a little while more, until you are grown up."

*

Amine's mother is as delicate and beautiful as a curled stroke of calligraphy, as strong as a well-reasoned sentence on a parchment page. 

When she was not busy, she told Amine stories, her hands weaving back and forth in a complex dance of possibilities. It is how she remembers her mother - as a series of images and a constellation of words.

Amine would lay her head in her mother's lap, her hair pooling out like a black river on white cotton. Her mother stroked her hair and told tales of wonder and religion, stories of her life and Amine's family. Stories of all kinds of fabulous journeys under the heavens - from the wanderings of Hagar in the desert, to the seven trials of Sinbad. Listening to tales of family and the fantastic, the heroes and heroines became her uncles and aunts, her mother and father, and even herself.

She told Amine of the family she had left behind to join her husband. There were a few keepsakes she had brought from her home, revealed when she told her stories. She handed Amine a little brass case, decorated with swirling silver lines. The case opened with such a snap, Amine could not resist flapping it open and closed like the beaks of the birds that stalked the garden walls.

With gentle hands, her mother took it away and drew out a pen and paper from the recesses inside the case.

"This was a gift from my brother on my wedding day. If you do not break it, it might last long enough to become yours." She spread the paper out in front of her, resting Amine in her lap. "Here is my name," she said, and pointed to a section hidden on the lid. Then with one smooth motion, she dipped the pen in ink, and neatly wrote one character. "This is the first letter of your name. Watch closely..."

The ink flies over the paper, as black on white as a raven against a winter sky.

*

She is seventeen now, the same age her mother was when she married. The whole world lies in front of her, walking side by side with her husband, Philip. The stories and lands she imagined as a child are as real as the flagstones under her feet.

Amine had heard of, and her mother had tried to explain, the movements of the stars in the celestial sphere. How the stars followed their own particular path through the heavens - as regular as the phases of the moon, the turning of the seasons, or the call to prayer five times a day. The stars above circle in their own dance, as unfathomable as the eyes of the angels.

Do these stars, these Gods, look down on them now? Are the words that such petty humans as her and Philip speak heard and remembered - each oath of "I do," "I swear," or "I believe" ? Are their fates written in the enduring motion of the stars?

What does her God, her mother, think of her standing veiled and ready under the vaults of a church? They marry in his church in the small town of Ternuese. It is a new story to learn at so late an age, the religion of her husband Philip.

She looked away from the priest speaking at the pulpit, not wanting to hear her first Christian sermon. His words are nothing more than one interpretation of the world, less believable to her than the faith of her mother.

How many weddings had these plaster saints observed? Did they know in their own way, which marriage would lead to future happiness, which to despair? She stared at the statue of Mary with her crown of stars, holding it's cool blank gaze.

If this is her fate, so be it. She must take the same chances her mother took, to throw herself into an uncertain future.

After the sermon ends, she kisses Philip, more than a little desperately, as his fingers entwine in her hair. They place the marriage register in front of her and if she pauses to spell out Vanderdecken, the letters of Amine slip off the pen.


End file.
